On Friday afternoon, I went and saw the Star Trek movie. About half way through the film, I realized that I had a big, sloppy grin sliding all over my face. And then, shortly after realizing that, something completely unanticipated happened, I began to feel emotional.
I certainly don’t consider myself a Trekkie, but I was born in 1966, the same year that the original Star Trek aired on TV. That cast have always, in one form or another, been present in my life, and in a weird way, they’re like old, friends of the family. Roughly the same age as my parents, they were an adult presence that was always around, and I guess I kind of felt like they were watching me grow up, just as I was watching them age.
Over the years, they’ve cycled in and out of favour, often being replaced by newer, cooler versions. The show became a bit of a camp classic, and it became positively embarrassing to watch the aging and portly actors running about in Federation uniforms that had been designed specifically to disguise their paunches.
This new Star Trek movie is a prequel that explicates the origins of the original crew of The Enterprise. To make this movie, they’ve completely recast the crew, so we don’t see a 78 year-old William Shatner trying to punch-out a Klingon, but a relatively unknown actor in his 20’s.
Seeing all the old actors I had grown up with reconfigured as vigorous and ambitious was what touched me, I think. We got to see a glimpse of them before they were defined, before they were set in our minds forever. For me, it was like watching my parents, before they became my parents, when they had lives and identities that were their very own.
The actors who played Scotty and Bones in the original have passed away, just as some of the old friends of the family have, too. The movie made me think of my parent’s and their generation of friends, of all the people who went through officer’s training and nursing school with them, and the kinship and camaraderie that they shared for decades after, as they watched over and protected one another’s children and grandchildren. The movie called them all back to me, and I saw my parent’s fallen friends—Buck Rogers, Bernie O’Neil, Norm Pascoe—written in the cast of the Star Trek crew, back before I knew them, when they were beautiful lions just setting out to try to realize their as yet unblemished fields of potential.